Daughter's Bonding
by Cotto
Summary: Rupert Giles' adopted daughter, Kennedy, finds her long-lost half-sister, and it's a pleasing surprise who this woman is.


**Disclaimer:** _BtVS belongs to Joss, not to me. I forego any financial remuneration for this literature piece._

 **Daughter's Bonding.**

 ** _A Journal Entry By Rupert Giles._**

 **Summary:** _Rupert Giles' adopted daughter, Kennedy, finds her long-lost half-sister, and it's a pleasing surprise who this woman is._

 **Characters/Pairings:** _Rupert Giles/Buffy Summers/Kennedy/Tara Maclay/ various others._

 **Author's Story Notes:** _I plan this to be a small story, only a few chapters at most- a kind of short novella, actually, a short and very gentle novella; from Rupert Giles' point of view._

 **Rating:** _K at least, T at most, definitely not M or more._

 **Genre(s):** _Family, Supernatural, Spiritual, Friendship._

 **Chapter 1./Entry 1.): A Most Domestic Surprise!**

 **Chapter 1 Beginning Author's Notes:** _Mark my words, this'll be gentle. Kenn Faith Dawn, this is one of the experiments about who Kennedy's half-sister is for your storyline you sent me some time ago- sorry I didn't get to it before now, but this should open the doorway to the story so you can word it out well._

 _Sincerely happy to be your partner in this venture; signed: Cotto._

I'm sitting down to a morning cup of tea, or more accurately a large mug of the stuff; due to being very drowsy this morning- perhaps it's all the caffeine in this stuff that makes me so drowsy right now these days- if so, I really need to cut back on the stuff and let my natural systems restore the proper balance of sleepiness in my system and get myself to sleep right- this could be a disaster otherwise! Anyhow, at that moment I hear my adopted eighteen-and-a-half year old daughter yell something to me, and come running down the stairs into the family home courtyard. In her sun-tanned hand she's got an old paper, one I recognize was from her baby-days, more accurately, the days of her childhood, for it is in reference to her adoption.

Upon closer examination, which she insisted on, quite firmly I might add, the paper referenced an older half-sister, by the name of Tara, who was adopted into the Maclay family... I did not recall this Tara, but she said that her searches had indicated that Tara lives on a ranch in Colorado, or somewhere like that.

However, she was quite clear that she'd met her in UC Sunnydale, where she started yesterday... insistent beyond all reason on that point, to the point of complete and utter stubbornness, to a fault in fact. Now, my daughter is a pretty darn good driver, and she drove herself to College and back yesterday... she didn't have classes today, but she's known for safety on the road- perhaps that's a fruit of her preternatural gifts: almost instantly judging accurately spacial distances., since her gift came to the fore she's always been very good at that- frankly, I'm impressed.

Anyhow, she made clear that she had met this woman, and had chatted her up a bit; and she was wondering if she could bring her over for dinner.

Initially I was scared; I know my daughter likes girls, well, young women to be exact now; so it wouldn't be easy for me to agree that this could be allowed, or should be allowed, but on the other hand, how'd I know that this wouldn't be chaste, and besides, shouldn't I know what kind of people my kid's hanging around with in the first place? That was why I agreed, besides, if this young woman was indeed her older half-sister, would it likely be anything *but* a celibate encounter in reality, and wasn't I being a bit panicky over my child's orientation in the first place? I was just being paranoid, I figured, so I agreed, figuring I should at least meet this young lady who my child loved.

And loved is the right word, as I had figured out yesterday when I went over to her room to find out how her first day was at UC Sunnydale: from her physical disposition and her facial expression, I knew she was in a mindset of absolute and complete love; she just looked so calm and content, with a look of such devotion in her face it was unmistakable to behold!

When I probed her deeper, I found out that she had met a young woman who she suspected was her long-lost half-sister; later on I'd be surprised to find out exactly what kind of a team the two would make, especially when my students, Kennedy and Buffy go hunting together.

Kennedy likes to spend her free time these days sparring with Buffy in the sunlight; she says, and I agree with her completely on this, that the more stress you put your body under while preparing to go into combat, the better odds you have of coming out alive. As I watch my "apprentices" spar and wrestle in the back-yard's grass-covered landscape, memories come to mind; memories of a not-so-pleasing nature to think about...

Some time ago, as I recall it, I was summoned to speak to my boss, Snyder, on a most problematic matter. It turned out that Kennedy had been in a bit of a fight with another young woman who works with her and my other apprentice, as I think of my slayers, as well as works with Faith and had done so with Kendra; a young woman by the name of Cordelia Chase. To make a long story short, Kennedy had picked Cordelia up bodily and put her in the school dumpster, well, Miss Chase had had some help getting out- luckily so, otherwise she'd have taken an unscheduled trip to the city dump! Kennedy had been observed doing this, and getting into a fight with Cordelia, and the incident had been reported to Principal Snyder.

I knew that Kennedy had a tendency to bully in her personality- as I knew the same trait was in Miss Chase, so I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was when I saw my adopted daughter sitting in the principal's office, with signs of a fight on her clothes... I shouldn't have allowed my hopes to get as high as they did about her self-mastery, clearly, for then I'd not be so incredibly disappointed in her as I was, but I was.

Snyder himself was surprised- he said that he wanted to meet with her dad, and had demanded her hand him her cell-phone to allow him to contact her dad; he just hadn't expected that her dad worked with him from day one of his employment here.

To settle the issue of my child's horrible behavior, I assured him that I'd talk to her when I got home from work- easy enough, as I was her main transportation to and from school.

Kennedy's look indicated both indignation at this situation, fear of being grounded (which I figured a most likely punishment), and some degree of shame over her actions, or so I guessed about her expression and head-down posture. I thought that Snyder took entirely too much pleasure in her apparent humiliation, but her bullying episodes towards Miss Chase *couldn't* be allowed to continue; so I took a different tack on her misbehavior.

The travel home was silent for the most part, ending in a totally different encounter in Kennedy's post-school training regimen. While she worked out and did gymnastics in the back yard, I calmly informed her in no uncertain terms of an "enlargement" of her training, something I told her I'd been meaning to address with her, but hadn't found the right time to do so.

"There are letters, testimonies" I said, "referring to a monster that "travels throughout the world, seeking the ruin of souls"... just something to keep in mind." I told her in an offhand manner, as if sending her on a "seek and destroy" mission. It had the desired effect of both getting her attention, and setting her into combat mode.

Her dark brown eyes gleamed with a protective rage that I'd seen before in her- it often spelled doom for vampires or other enemies of humanity that she fought, and setting her jaw and eyes into an angry and firm facial expression as if about to get into a bar fight, she said "Just point me to him, I'm going to kick his behind! I'll KILL HIM!" she said.

Now I knew she took this seriously, but would she have the strength where and of the kind that it mattered, the skill, and the endurance to go head-to-head with something that diabolical and ancient- old enough to be one of the first generation of creatures ever made, and yet still sane and sober (as far as it goes for something divorced from morality and therefore from reality)? I took in her body posture and replied to my eighteen-year-old child "It's not that kind of enemy" then I took her inside to sit with me and calmly told her "to fight this one, it requires absolute control here." and I gestured to her heart "And here." with that I gestured to her forehead, lightly touching both points, "As well as a great amount and development of the "farms", the virtue of charity to sustain the fight against that monster. In reality if one's charity goes kaput, or mostly that is, the next part of them to fail is their self-worth, leading often to suicide- hence a victory in the hands of that monster- that's how he, or more accurately it, bags people: by eroding their morals till they end up devaluing themselves and others till they do something horrible like that."

"This being is not able to be killed, nor fought in the traditional sense- no weapon can harm something that's not corporeal- that's pure spirit- though there's probably nothing remotely *pure* about it anymore" I said, chuckling the last phrase as I said it "look here" I showed her some letters that refer to the First Evil "and here" some more letters "and then tell me if that doesn't look like a being best commonly described as a "fallen angel", or a fallen spirit." I said to her- I know, we differ in beliefs, but adopting her has opened my eyes to beliefs I had long thought dead in my own ethnicity: If I can love her from an adopted dad's perspective, even as disastrous as my behavior was in my younger-adult years when I *should've* been studying in College to become a proper Watcher and had left to join a gang, then couldn't a more perfect being care more completely about its or His children? That was the general attitude my adoption of this flawed young woman had brought up in me.

"How do we fight it?" Kennedy was determined, to say the least- she wasn't going to give this up, her attitude, I suspected, was that "just because it hasn't been successfully tried doesn't mean it can't be done- where there's a will there's a way." and she wasn't about to give up, come what may, no matter what.

I was exhausted, but knowing my kid, she was going to find a way; better to hear from me what I know of how to fight this entity than to have her go off and enter into some kooky pseudo-religion's methods like those of the newer "New Age" groups that come up from time to time, so I exhaled in a "Pbbhbbpb" sighing sound, muttered "Good Heavens", cleaned my glasses, and, after going for a drink of soda from my fridge, I sat back down to inform her of how to do it "You have to rob it of its power over you... it has a hold on everyone, due to something in ancient legend" it then occurred to me, and I took out an old book "according to this book, long before even the prehistory of the human race, there was a sanctuary not discovered by our ancient enemies where humans *could* live in peace and grow; this place came to be known as "the garden of Eden" but the rest of the world was ruled by barbaric and brutal beings; one of these monsters, the worst of them all, an ancient being best thought of as their "secretary general", made its way into the garden; and may have possessed a serpent to accomplish its dirty deeds." I paused to take a breather and let my words sink it before continuing "In a modern nutshell, it got humanity's first parents, of whom we all carry on some genetic material, to take a form of a drug that neutralized their preternatural gifts and rendered them mostly helpless to its influence and powers... so, total control of the emotions- a goal that cannot be accomplished in one's lifetime, but if striven for is the ultimate safety to this being's powers, as it limits the being's ability to influence humans, is one means of effectively fighting back." I said this staring into her eyes.

"Also, we can't fight back on our own, it takes someOne far stronger than any human being, even a superpowered human to fight back against that monster, but it only really attacks the soul and mind- the spirit of the human, so that's how to resist it, but sometimes it attacks the soul or mind *through* the body or mind." I told her to enlighten her as to *what* she's dealing with when dealing with that monster.

"So, witches?" she asked in reply.

"They're cowards, intimidated by terror to sign over their freedom to the very gangster who terrorizes them and at the same time gives them their powers- they're fools, same with warlocks." I responded in total honesty- in an effort to inform my child of both how this being works and the hazards of this being's activity, as well as to discourage her from ever signing such a deal- not with propaganda, but with reality, something far more potent.

As I was to find out, the next few encounters would prove to be most enlightening- especially with my daughter's older half-sister I was soon to meet.

 **End Chapter 1 Author's Notes:** _Well, folks, I hope you like this one; next chapter will deal with Rupert seeing how Kennedy and Tara interact, as well as with Buffy too- and it ought to be most enlightening to behold. He doesn't know it yet, but having his adopted daughter's half-sister be that way could help them both- with how Tara's involved in "corrupted spirituality" it could benefit her herself, and Kennedy: she'd get skills by dealing with her sister's faults, hey, they both would!_


End file.
